So you’re Tony La Russa, your team is up by one run heading into the ninth inning and you’re facing the Astros’ 3-4-5 men, Lance Berkman, Carlos Lee and Miguel Tejada. Whom do you summon from the bullpen?

We imagine that TLR has some numbers written down on a notecard in his back pocket. If we were him, here’s what we’d want to be looking at: A matrix of my relievers by batter, with each batter’s Gross-Production Average (plate appearances in parentheses). We’ve highlighted the actually matchups and italicized the most favorable ones (by GPA, anyway):

What really happened Wednesday night was La Russa bringing in Trever Miller to face Big Puma. It was a smart move: Though Miller had no history against Berkman, Berkman’s OBP drops about 50 points against southpaws (.426 to .370). Of course, the other LOOGy option was Reyes, who has been relatively successful against the Astros’ first baseman.

Certainly it was wise to wait to bring in Ryan Franklin until Lee, who has a dismal .228 GPA against him (mostly from their American League days). So far, so good. Things got interesting, though, after Lee’s double (and subsequent pinch-runner brought in). Though Tejada doesn’t hit Franklin particular well for power, his .261 GPA is based mostly on his .368 OBP –and since the Astros needed only a base hit (and not power), the Franklin-Tejada matchup wasn’t as favorable. Still, TLR didn’t have many other options vs. the Astros’ performance-reduced (?) shortstop: Only Motte and Reyes have had any success, and that was in a very small sample. Hawksworth shuts down righties (.150 GPA), but La Russa probably preferred his veteran in such a high-leverage situation.

Keppinger was another matter, with a .420 GPA against Franklin. We don’t expect La Russa to pull his closer for the final out, but if it were us, we would’ve considered McClellan. Again, all the Astros needed was a single (and, with a runner on third after Tejada’s at-bat, an infield single at that), and Keppinger had had three singles in five plate appearances against Franklin. Some may call it overmanaging, but we’ve seen a lot more acute examples from TLR over the years.

As the bard wrote, though, all’s well that ends well. Indeed, the Cardinals go for a sweep Thursday afternoon, up nine games on the Cubs and with a magic number of 28.

This entry was posted by Pip on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 9:31 am and is filed under by the numbers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.